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To many, the Great Work seemed a Great Folly. His persistence, his desire to verify even the smallest detail, were ridiculed in the press. It seemed as if he would never finish; he almost abandoned the book in despair. He sank into glooms which rendered him incapable of work for weeks on end. Meanwhile, lack of money caused him constant anxiety. He kept abandoning his book to pursue his career, often for months at a time. At various points he lapsed into heavy drinking, which left him hung over and unable to write. Often he worked while eating, concentrating despite the domestic distractions around him. He neglected his wife, who was terminally ill with tuberculosis; when she died he was tormented by remorse. As he accumulated more and more source-material, the book swelled; he was warned that nobody would buy such a huge biography at the high price that it would inevitably command. In the wreckage of his disordered mind, he clung to the memory of Johnson as a shipwrecked sailor clings to a rock. In the midst of his disappointment and despair, Boswell immortalized the life of the man he revered above all others.

The Universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore.

Many would happily move to somewhere rather smaller of their own devising, and this is what most beings in fact do.

For instance, in one corner of the Eastern Galactic Arm lies the large forest planet of Oglaroon, the entire "intelligent" population of which lives permanently in one fairly small and crowded nut tree. In which tree they are born, live, fall in love, carve tiny speculative articles in the bark on the meaning of life, the futility of death and the importance of birth control, fight a few extemely minor wars and eventually die strapped to the underside of some of the less accessible outer branches.

In fact the only Oglaroonians who ever leave their tree are those who are hurled out for the heinous crime of wondering whether any of the other trees might be capable of supporting life at all, or indeed whether the other trees are anything other than illusions brought on by eating too many Oglanuts.

Exotic though this behavior may seem, there is no life form in the galaxy which is not in some way guilty of the same thing...

In trying to decide whether life has any meaning at all and if humankind is a vile and noisome parasite uselessly and absurdly struggling to survive and perpetuate its kind without any good reason for what it's up to, so pointless is its existence that mass suicide or a huge asteroid striking the planet could only be considered a favor to the universe, one should not look at natural disasters that cruelly and remorsely wipe out thousands of lives in the blink of an eye with no apparent detriment to the continuation of either the species or the earth, nor should one look at man-made disasters like wars, famines, accidents at nuclear power plants, and smaller-scale mayhem like car accidents and drive-by shootings which, though leaving behind lower body counts, are just as evil and senseless to the individuals involved.

No, all natural disasters prove is that Nature has different reasons and different ends in going about its business than do human beings. That Nature wants a volcano where human beings wanted a city doesn't mean that it was pointless for human beings to want the city, only that Nature was more insistent. Anyway, on the whole, in confrontations between human beings and Nature, human beings win most of the arguments, thanks to things like sun block, central heating, GORE-TEX, and bulldozers.

And man-made disasters---whether large scale, like wars, famine, economic catastrophies bankrupting whole nations; or small scale like murder, dinner at fast food restaurants, and a bad day at the track---are in fact the cause of the Question, and the thing that causes the question cannot, rhetorically, be its own answer.

We can't ask: Because there are wars, famines, economic catastrophes, etc., does that mean that life is pointless and human kind doomed to a meaningless and absurd existence? And then reply, yes, life is pointless and human kind is doomed to a meaningless etc. because of wars, famines, economic catastrophes etc.

Rhetoriticians have technical terms to describe such an argument.

Rhetoriticians have entirely too much time on their hands.

On top of this, man-made disasters don't prove that man, or woman, is doomed to a pointless and meaningless existence; all they in fact prove is that man, and woman, make mistakes. We aren't perfect. We are weak, subject to temptation, often our attention wanders, and on a regular basis thoroughly rotten human beings come along to exploit our weaknesses and take advantage of our wandering attention. Because we screw up or get screwed doesn't mean that life has no reason and humankind is an absurdity; it just means we need to try harder.

Which we can do.

The question then arises, why bother?

So I think that if one is going to ask the question---not the Why bother? question, but the first one, the What is the point, if there is even a point? question---one should look at things human beings have done deliberately that they are proud of.

Things that we put our minds and our talent and our skills to, intending to build or create an improvement. Things we think have made life better.

Things like the New Jersey Turnpike.

I think I've answered the question. Life has no meaning and humankind is absurd.

At least, that's how I felt driving north toward Passaic this afternoon in the rain.

Yes, once giants walked the earth, men and women went naked and were not ashamed, the lion lay down with the lamb, and cool memes bounced hither and yon across the vastness of cyberspace, touching hearts, challenging the best minds, and inspiring millions, to the relief of many a burned out, blocked, or harried blogger traveling over the holidays who needs something quick and easy to write about because he is trying to post from his mother-in-law's kitchen while she is bustling about cleaning up after breakfast and biting her tongue to keep from asking when she can use her own phone.

Ezra's question about the missing cool memes was brought on by his being tagged with the Meme of Four during a temporary lull in the holiday festivities when he was bored enough to actually tackle the Meme of Four.

The Meme of Four is a simple "Tell the class a little bit about yourself" meme arranged in lists of four.

Four places you've lived.

Four jobs you've worked.

Four albums you can't live without.

Etc. etc. etc. etc.

And as befits a Meme of Four, the memed is then asked to meme four fellow bloggers.

Ezra has tagged me.

This shows that even brilliant young men like Ezra Klein have their lapses when their minds wander. Perhaps a pretty girl walked by, perhaps he was watching a football game and his team scored a touchdown. Whatever he was doing, he wasn't thinking. If he wants more cool meme-ing, he should tag only the certifiably cool and I am the uncoolest guy on the left side of bandwidth.

Even Kevin Drum is cooler. Kevin gets points just from living in California and from never ever bothering to even try to act cool. I routinely prove my utter lack of cool by trying to pass.

Once, back in college, there was a moment when I was cool by association---this really cool girl thought I was cool, but the arrrival of the police and Interpol nipped that romance in the bud.

Answering the questions honestly would just prove how uncool a life I lead and send me into a George Bailey on the bridge existential funk.

To avoid that, I’ve decided to make some changes in the questions. Won’t make me any cooler, but the answers will be more fun to type. Anything is better than having to type Muncie, Indiana as anything other than a punchline.

Four jobs they couldn’t pay you enough to do: Hospital orderly, steeplejack, game show host, Sean Hannity’s barber.

Four movies you used to love and watched over and over to the point that now you have them memorized and the prospect of watching them again causes your eyeballs to bleed: The Philadelphia Story, MASH, It’s A Wonderful Life, Barefoot in the Park.

Alternatively, four movies you loved when you saw them in the theater but don’t dare watch again for fear they won’t hold up: Shakespeare in Love, Lost in Translation (Hello, Roxanne!), Big Night, and Election.

Four places in the United States you've always thanked God you don't live even when you were living in Muncie, IN: Dallas, Texas; Burlington, Iowa; Youngstown, Ohio; Waycross, Georgia.

Four places you would like to visit on an extended vacation: Paris; Edinburgh; Melbourne, Australia; Juneau, Alaska, no kidding.

Four TV shows you are strangely tempted to watch but have so far resisted: Lost; Charmed; Beauty and the Geek; The Iron Chef.

Four Websites that aren’t on your blogroll that you visit daily: Like hell I’m going to tell you! The blonde reads this.

Four foods you don’t really like and can’t understand why you eat them but you eat them anyway and feel bad about it afterwards: Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches; chocolate iced donuts; lentil soup; onion rings.

Four albums you never listen to anymore but can’t bring yourself to trade in at Tower Records:Baseball’s Greatest Hits; Wagner’s Parsifal; Grover Washington's Next Exit; the original Broadway cast recording of Man of La Mancha

Four places you’d rather be but sadly won’t be any time soon: Upstairs at Christians in Chatham; in the audience at any of the theaters at the Stratford Festival; Carson’s Ribs; a table by the fireplace in a cozy back room in some great bar with all of you on New Year’s eve.

Feel free to answer the original questions, my variations, or any variations of your own. And of course all of you reading are tagged and requested to answer any and/or all of the questions in the comments.

Word of warning: The Countess, Trish Wilson, has also tagged me with a similar meme. Ezra tagged me first, but I'll get to Trish's later in the week---and hers is a meme of seven!

He dressed himself all in his best, and at last got out into the
streets. The people were by this time pouring forth, as he had seen
them with the Ghost of Christmas Present; and walking with his hands
behind him, Scrooge regarded every one with a delighted smile. He
looked so irresistibly pleasant, in a word, that three or four
good-humoured fellows said,' Good morning, sir. A merry Christmas to
you.' And Scrooge said often afterwards, that of all the blithe sounds
he had ever heard, those were the blithest in his ears...

He went to church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people
hurrying to and fro, and patted children on the head, and questioned
beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of houses, and up to the
windows, and found that everything could yield him pleasure. He had
never dreamed that any walk -- that anything -- could give him so much
happiness.

`Man of the worldly mind!' replied the Ghost, `do you believe in me or not?'

`I do,' said Scrooge. `I must. But why do spirits walk the earth, and why do they come to me?'

`It
is required of every man,' the Ghost returned, `that the spirit within
him should walk abroad among his fellowmen, and travel far and wide;
and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so
after death. It is doomed to wander through the world -- oh, woe is me!
-- and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth,
and turned to happiness!'

Again the spectre raised a cry, and shook its chain and wrung its shadowy hands.

`You are fettered,' said Scrooge, trembling. `Tell me why?'

`I
wear the chain I forged in life,' replied the Ghost. `I made it link by
link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my
own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?'

Scrooge trembled more and more.

`Or
would you know,' pursued the Ghost, `the weight and length of the
strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as
this, seven Christmas Eves ago. You have laboured on it, since. It is a
ponderous chain!'

The clerk, in letting Scrooge's nephew out, had let two other people
in. They were portly gentlemen, pleasant to behold, and now stood, with
their hats off, in Scrooge's office. They had books and papers in their
hands, and bowed to him.

'Scrooge and Marley's, I believe,' said one of the gentlemen, referring to his list. 'Have I the pleasure of addressing Mr Scrooge, or Mr Marley?'

'Mr Marley has been dead these seven years,' Scrooge replied. 'He died seven years ago, this very night.'

'We
have no doubt his liberality is well represented by his surviving
partner,' said the gentleman, presenting his credentials.

'It
certainly was, for they had been two kindred spirits. At the ominous
word liberality, Scrooge frowned, and shook his head, and handed the
credentials back.

'They are. Still,' returned the gentleman,' I wish I could say they were not.'

'The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?' said Scrooge.

'At this festive season of the year, Mr
Scrooge,' said the gentleman, taking up a pen, 'it is more than usually
desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and
destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are
in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of
common comforts, sir.'

'Are there no prisons?"

'Plenty of prisons,' said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.

'And the Union workhouses.' demanded Scrooge. 'Are they still in operation?'

'Both very busy, sir.'

'Oh.
I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred
to stop them in their useful course,' said Scrooge. 'I'm very glad to
hear it.'

'Under the impression that they scarcely furnish
Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,' returned the
gentleman, 'a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the
Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time,
because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and
Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?'

'Nothing!' Scrooge replied.

'You wish to be anonymous?'

'I
wish to be left alone,' said Scrooge. 'Since you ask me what I wish,
gentlemen, that is my answer. I don't make merry myself at Christmas
and I can't afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the
establishments I have mentioned-they cost enough; and those who are
badly off must go there.'

'Many can't go there; and many would rather die.'

'If they would rather die,' said Scrooge, 'they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."

'A few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat
and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a
time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices.
What shall I put you down for?'

Peace on earth, good will toward men and women, and charity, especially charity, are not anywheres near as important themes in The Gospel According to Scrooge as they are in Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

In fact, The Gospel According to Scrooge doesn't much concern itself with Scrooge's lack of generosity or his moneygrubbing, except to almost approve the latter and prescribe narrow, familial limits on the former. The script dispenses with Scrooge's nephew Fred and turns Bob Cratchitt into his nephew, so that at the end of the play, with his heart newly opened up to Jesus, Scrooge is expansive enough now to make his nephew Bob a full partner in his firm.

The Cratchitts are rewarded for their faith by being made rich and although I remember some offhand comments by Scrooge about maybe giving some more to charity the effect of the ending is to promise the audience that believing in Jesus leads to storing up treasures on earth up to the rafters.

In A Christmas Carol Marley and the other damned souls wandering through the night air on Christmas eve are tormented by their desire to do good for others now that they have lost the power to do so.

Their lack of charity is their sin.

The Gospel According to Scrooge ignores this, because the churches that put the play on reject the idea that good works are what get you into heaven.

I was raised Catholic and I've never been able to get my head around this; but if that's what they believe then that's what their sermons are going to preach. Their business.

But I don't like The Gospel According to Scrooge because of that. Dickens was a Christian, although not much of a church-goer, and he wrote the story as a Christmas story, which is to say as a story about the meaning and spirit of a holiday he regarded as Christian---but his message is universal, and Scrooge's redemption doesn't depend on him becoming a good churchman. He goes to church on Christmas morning and joins in on the carols but the point of that is that he joins in. He merges his voice with those of other people. He's not solitary anymore.

Scrooge's sin in Dickens's story is his wish to be left alone, his being content to make his way through life along the edges, his insistence on being as secret, self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. And that's a temptation that we all feel sometimes.

In The Gospel According to Scrooge all that's the matter with Scrooge is that he hasn't accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior, which is decidely not the matter with almost everybody in the church watching the play. The audience doesn't identify with Scrooge's sin, they get to shake their head sadly in self-congratulatory pity. At the end of the play they are allowed to bask in the glow of their own Chadbandian smugness and vanity and their applause is for their own good fortune in already being members of the club.

But with A Christmas Carol we are encouraged to identify with Scrooge---that's why Dickens made him a comedian. Scrooge gets all the best jokes.---and we are forced to see ourselves in him. Because we all are Scrooges, not just from time to time, but too often. We let ourselves get caught up in our worldy affairs to the exclusion of all else, especially a sympathy with our fellow passengers to the grave. We all are selfish, self-centered, self-indulgent. We all want to be left alone to get on with our own business, and we all succeed in pushing other people away. We chase the carolers from our doorstep, we ignore our responsibilities to the people dependent on us if not for their survival then for some good cheer, hope, love, encouragement. We are all often content to edge our way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance. Scrooge's miserly ways are a symbol of his hoarding of himself, of his keeping himself apart. We are all misers in that way, secret, self-contained, and solitary as oysters.

The reason for the season isn't Jesus, it's what Jesus came to remind us to do.

Which was one thing.

Love one another.

And so, in case I don't get another post in before tomorrow to wish you all a merry one, a happy holiday whichever holiday you are celebrating tomorrow, let this message from Scrooge's nephew Fred be my Merry Christmas to all of us:

'There are many things from which I might have derived good, by
which I have not profited, I dare say,' returned the nephew. 'Christmas
among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time,
when it has come round -apart from the veneration due to its sacred
name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that- as
a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only
time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women
seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think
of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the
grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And
therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in
my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and
I say, God bless it!'

'I
do,' said Scrooge. 'Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry?
What reason have you to be merry? You're poor enough.'

'Come,
then,' returned the nephew gaily. 'What right have you to be dismal?
What reason have you to be morose? You're rich enough.'

Scrooge having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said, 'Bah!' again; and followed it up with 'Humbug!'

'Don't be cross, uncle.' said the nephew.

'What else can I be,' returned the uncle, 'when I live in such a world
of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas. What's
Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time
for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for
balancing your books and having every item in them through a round
dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,' said Scrooge indignantly,'every idiot who goes
about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips, should be boiled with his own
pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He
should!'

'Uncle!' pleaded the nephew.

'Nephew!' returned the uncle, sternly, 'keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.'

"But what did Scrooge care? It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way
along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its
distance, was what the knowing ones call 'nuts' to Scrooge."

Idyllopus has a fun post up.---There's a tautology. Does she post any other kind?---Inspired by her niece's casting in a production of A Christmas Carol, she sings the praises of her favorite movie Scrooge, Albert Finney, who played a singing and dancing Scrooge in the musical Scrooge. She writes:

Some find Albert Finney’s gnarled Scrooge obnoxious and hate the fact
it’s a musical, and I could do without some of the lispy singing of
cute kids, but Finney does a pretty good job of making believable
Scrooge’s reformation in one night. Alastair Sim, in the 1951 film, is
too eager to be out of his box, too ready, and can leap too high. The
dissolution of Finney’s misanthropy is slightly more complex and is
less through his being challenged morally, than being reminded of how
he can still feel, that the capacity for joy is still there, which he
can only experience after wading the grief of the past. The film
doesn’t do a good job with explaining how Scrooge goes from a dancing
young man in love to an isolated miser (I read the book to H.o.p. a
couple of years ago and can’t recollect how it fares on making this
believable) but never mind. The Spirit of Christmas Present sits on
Scrooge and tricks him into participating for a change and seems
Scrooge is ready to be tricked. He is less inspired by fear than he is
released from gray cynicism. And fear.

Idyllopus's post reminded me that back in September the Viscount LaCarte, inspired by nothing so warm and touching as a young relative's early foray into a life in the theatre, but by Dick Cheney's Scroogish performance during a visit to Katrina-devastated New Orleans, wrote about his favorite movie Scrooge, George C. Scott. Sez the Viscount:

Over the years, the Alistair Sim Scrooge has been celebrated as the
standard by which all others are judged, but I do not share that
opinion. I think Scott’s Scrooge is by far the best, because he is gleefully mean. He is his own audience, and he is greatly amused by his miserliness and his callous indifference to suffering.

The
classic scene is when he is approached by businessmen for a
contribution to charity. He welcomes this opportunity to express his
disdain for the poor. He appears to live for moments such as these.
When he first encounters them, they say something like, “Mr. Scrooge, I
don’t believe you’ve made our acquaintance” and he mutters with a wry
grin, “Nor do I wish to.” They then go on to explain to him about the
suffering children, the whole exchange about “Are there no prisons? No
work farms?” The defining moment though, is when they tell him that
conditions are so bad that some would rather die, and he says,
(paraphrased from memory) “Well, if they’d rather die then let them
die. It will reduce the surplus (laughing!) population.” There is the
difference. Alistair Sim delivers those lines in anger, but Scott
delivers them with glee, reveling in the fact that he is so clever in
his meanness. He is proud of being such a scoundrel. He loves being a
miser.

Me, I love both Sims' and Scott's Scrooges, each has different virtues. I have a soft spot for Finney, but I think Mr Magoo's is the better musical version, and I'm not kidding.

So rather than write about my favorite Scrooge, I'm going to write about my least favorite. (No, not Cheney.) It's not a movie Scrooge, but a stage Scrooge, and actually the actor playing the part wasn't at all bad. It was the play, which was called The Gospel According to Scrooge.

You're already dreading what's to come, I'll bet, quaking like Scrooge in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, terrified to follow but knowing you must for your own reclamation.

The Gospel According to Scrooge was performed at an Evangelical mega-church in Syracuse and don't ask how I wound up in the audience. The production values were professional. The church was rich and could afford to pull out all the stops. The acting was decent---good community theater level talent. What made the show awful was the script. It stuck to the main outlines of Dickens' story but the playwright Christianized it.

Over the years, it's been regularly remarked by critics, literature profs, and civilian lovers of Dickens that A Christmas Carol for all its Christmas spirit is not a particulary religious tale. There are very few references to the Reason for the Season.

True, but Dickens was writing for an almost totally Christian audience, most of whom would have been regular church-goers. He could assume that his readers knew the background. Besides, he was writing fiction. If his readers wanted a sermon, they knew where to go to hear one.

But the few Christian and religious references Dickens does put in are pointed and explicit. (See Tiny Tim's reason for hoping the people in church were looking at his crippled legs.) A Christmas Carol isn't a Christian allegory, like the Narnia books; its message is universal and not dependent on any religion, but it was written by a believer, who didn't particularly try to leave his faith out of any his writing, and so the story does have a Christian spirit, enough anyway that you wouldn't think Christians would have a reason to make changes.

My mistake. I keep thinking of Christianity as including everybody who believes that Jesus of Nazereth was the son of God and the Messiah.

I forget that the Fundies have a different, and much more exclusive idea, of who counts as a Christian, and Dickens doesn't.

To give you an idea of what changes the playwright made, I'll quote from a letter I wrote to my old friend Bill the night I saw The Gospel According to Scrooge:

As theology, it made my skin crawl. What is it about Evangelicalism that makes me feel like a devout atheist? Besides the fact that by the lights of Evangelicals I am a devout atheist.

It stuck pretty close to the story. Big difference is that in Dickens' world whenever somebody talks about Jesus and being saved as much as the characters tonight did it's a sure sign that person's a raging hypocrite. Here everybody's a pharisee at the front of the temple and yet that's considered a good thing.

Scrooge isn't visted by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come. He's visited by angels. Who behave like Dickens' ghosts, so why the change?

Tiny Tim doesn't die when Scrooge dies, by the way. I want to think the playwright spared him as a matter of dramatic expediency---by the time the Angel of Christmas Yet to Come shows, we're two hours into the show. But at the Cratchitt family Christmas they say a prayer, a long, specific prayer that Tiny Tim gets well, and so I'm suspecting that Tiny Tim lives so that the audience doesn't ask why God didn't answer their prayer.

Also it turns Scrooge's fiancee Belle into a prig. She doesn't break it off because Scrooge loves money more than her or anything. She accepts Scrooge's declaration that he does love her. She just won't marry a guy who doesn't love her particular version of God.

There's a non-Dickensian moment in Scrooge's past when young Scrooge loses his faith. You'd think that would have been a good moment for an angel to show up. But, nope. We're told God would have sent one, but Scrooge rejected Him, so tough luck Ebenezer. Scrooge is nine years old at the time! God gets miffed at third graders and leaves them to damn themselves?

"Well, Lance, the Lord works in mysterious ways. His ways aren't our ways and we shouldn't expect him to think like we do." I buy that, actually, but everybody who says this then goes on to explain what God's up to in fairly specific terms.

Get the picture?

In The Gospel According to Scrooge, Scrooge's sin is not miserliness and it's not misanthropy---it's that he's rejected Jay-sus!

<>

(End of Stave One. I have to go do some last minute Christmas shopping. Stave Two later this afternoon. In the meantime, while you are thinking about which is your favorite Scrooge you can also go over to Rox Populi and vote for your favorite movie Jesus.

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge. a
squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old
sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck
out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an
oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed
nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his
thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty
rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He
carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his
office in the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.

External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no
wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no
falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less
open to entreaty. Foul weather didn't know where to have him. The
heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over
him in only one respect. They often came down handsomely, and Scrooge
never did.

Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say,
with gladsome looks, 'My dear Scrooge, how are you? When will you come
to see me?' No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children
asked him what it was o'clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life
inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge. Even the blind
men's dogs appeared to know him; and when they saw him coming on, would
tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag their
tails as though they said, 'No eye at all is better than an evil eye,
dark master!'

But what did Scrooge care? It was the very
thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life,
warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, was what the knowing
ones call 'nuts' to Scrooge.

As Exiled in NJ noted in a comment here the other day, President Bush's recent upswing in the polls is due mainly to Republicans who've apparently gotten over Hurricane Katrina and Mike "Heckuva Job" Brownie and decided that as long as Bush isn't currently letting another major American city drown he's doing ok by them.

Be interesting to see how much of a fall off the President's declaration that he is king and the king gets to spy on any of his subjects whenever he gets a whim to do so causes and how long it takes dismayed and disgusted Republicans to forgive and forget this one---although I suspect that Republicans who are dismayed and disgusted by this are more likely to be thoughtful people of real principle who will find it hard to think of Bush as anything but what he's shown himself to be, a petty tyrannt who feels unrestrained by law, tradition, principle, common decency, or even a healty fear of getting caught.

As for the first type of Republicans, well, I'm more concerned about and more concerned by the many Democrats and Independents who still think Bush is doing ok by them.

For Pete's sake, how much more damage does the man have to do?

Now, as Ezra points out, there are many millions of Americans who just want to like their President, no matter who he is or what party he belongs to. They are not Red State Americans or Blue State Americans. They are Red, White, and True Blue Americans and they believe in supporting the man in the White House come hell or high water because he represents the United States to the world. These people liked Clinton, and now they like Bush; they will like whoever comes next; and whenever they are asked by a pollster they will answer that they "approve" of the job the President is doing, partly because they believe it is their duty to approve, the way it is their duty to fly the flag on National Holidays and stand for the Star Spangled Banner and teach their kids to love their country, and partly because their own patriotism, innate decency, and what they remember of American history convinces them that whoever holds the office must be a decent man trying his hardest to do a difficult job in a way that best serves the entire nation.

They know in their heads that not every President is an Abe Lincoln or a George Washington, but in their hearts they believe that every President is doing his best to live up to the examples set by Abe Lincoln and George Washington.

So they may think things aren't going well for the President, they may even decide he's not doing a good enough job for them to vote for him next time out or for them to be sad when he leaves office when his term's up, but they still "approve" of the job he's doing.

Bush is the worst President ever, but it's a cumulative effect, and if you were to judge the last 5 years only by the two big things Americans care most about, how the economy is doing and whether or not we are at peace, then Bush doesn't look as bad as he is. (Another good point to stop and go see Ezra.) The economy is not great, but it's not as dismal as it turned under his father or even as bad as it got a couple of times during Reagan's tenure. And, although we are obviously not at peace, we aren't at war in a way most people have to notice.

In fact, a lot of people think we are at peace because we are at war.

They believe in the flypaper theory, they believe that getting rid of Saddam has helped make us safer, they believe that waging the war and staying the course has made would-be enemies think twice about taking us on, and they believe that we are busy knocking off terrorists by the score in Afghanistan and Iraq and pretty soon there'll be none left to knock off.

An awful lot of people do not think it's just a coincidence that in the four plus years since 9/11 we haven't suffered another major terrorist attack, and they thank their lucky stars for whatever it is George Bush has been doing, even if it hasn't been much, to protect us so well.

The rest of us can think they're foolish or naive or sadly, sadly misinformed, but every night when they turn on the TV and there's no video of a giant hole in the ground where some big American building used to be and every week when they cash their paycheck they aren't all that bothered that George Bush is President.

But to get back to those 80 per cent plus Republicans...

Not all of them, not the ones who belong to the group I described above, Americans who support Bush because he is the President and they always support whoever is President.

The rest of them, the more loyal Republicans.

I get the urge, too, to take them by their collective shirt fronts and shake them until their back teeth rattle, while demanding to know, "How much more damage does the guy have to do before you admit he's a total fuck-up?"

"What do you mean 'damage,' Lance, and please take your hands off me, you're wrinkling the material."

"What damage? The guy's lost his private little war, for crying out loud!"

"He hasn't lost it. We're winning. See your own flypaper theory above. Plus, as long as we're killing more little brown people than little brown people are killing of us, we're ahead. Plus, we're bringing democracy to the Middle East, which you'd know, if you could see into the future like we can where our dreams really do come true. We're optimists. We choose to believe in our dreams, unlike you cynical pessimists and defeatists who insist on counting flag-draped coffins and dead Iraqi babies, as if a few flag-draped coffins and dead Iraqi babies matter in the long run."

"He let New Orleans drown! He's letting it rot in its own waste!"

"Good riddence. Those people shouldn't have lived there anyway. And how come none of you Liberals ever worry about the people of Mississippi? NOLA, NOLA, NOLA! That's all you care about."

"Mississippi's a mess too! The Gulf Coast was devastated and Bush isn't doing anything to help them rebuild either!"

"They're mostly black and poor down there too, aren't they? Well, I'm sorry for them, and I'm not a racist, but they need to learn how to stand on their own two feet and break free from the cycle of dependency you racist Liberals have addicted them to with your big government programs, plus we just can't keep throwing good money after bad. We can't afford it"

"We can't afford it because Bush is bankrupting the treasury!"

"Yes, he is. Giggle giggle. Beautiful, isn't it?"

And now we get to it.

Whatever else George Bush has been, he's been a very successful Republican President.

Good Republicans support George Bush because he is the figurative head of their Party. If he fails, the Party fails, a fact a lot of worried Republican Congressmen are beginning to take note of. They know next fall's election will likely be a referendum on George W. Bush and they can't decide what their best course is for getting themselves re-elected, push the guy as far away from their districts as they can or fold their arms around him in a great big John McCain-esque hug. I suspect that unless Bush's poll numbers drop drastically among Republicans, for the most part the nervous Congressmen will stand by their man.

During the Impeachment Crisis, I of course, like every sensible person, thought that the charges against Clinton were ridiculous and that the Republicans were simply trying to pretend they weren't attempting a coup. But it wasn't just that I didn't think he deserved Impeachment or even censure. I didn't want him to be Impeached or be forced to resign because it would have been a defeat for the entire Democratic Party. (Paging Joe Lieberman, paging Joe Liberman. Your tailor called. He says he's turned your coat for you and it came out beautifully.) There were some pundits who said Bill should resign for the good of the Party. They said that that way Al Gore could run as the incumbent in 2000. But he would have run as the man who took over for the disgraced and defeated Bill Clinton. (As you know I think he ran as if he saw himself that way, anyway.) It's arguable that the Impeachment Crisis did do half the job the Republicans wanted it to do, wounding Gore and the rest of the Democrats at the polls, but I think what resulted is as nothing compared to what would have happened had they succeeded in driving Bill from the White House.

That's the loyal Democrat in me talking.

It would have taken a whole lot of really high crimes and misdemeanors to have convinced me Bill needed to go.

Loyal Republicans don't want to see their President defeated because they know it will translate into a defeat for them across the board. They won't admit, at least not in public, but maybe not even to themselves, that Bush is a failure, because it would feel like an admission that the Republican Party has failed.

Party loyalty should not trump loyalty to one's country. But Party loyalty is often mostly a matter of being loyal to one's own ego and interests, and vanity and self-interest usually trump every sort of principle in most every sort of human being, Republican or Democrat, Liberal or Conservative.

But besides that, as I said, George Bush has been a successful Republican President.

Nevermind the influence of the Religious Right, nevermind the neo-con warmongers and imperialists. You don't even have to consider the many disguised Dixiecrats.

The Republican Party is still, first and foremost, the party of Corporate America. That is, it is the party of rich white folk and the people who dream of nothing else but becoming rich white folk.

Since the Gilded Age, the Republican Party has stood for two things above all else. That the Government's job is to protect, serve, and help increase the wealth, status, and privileges of rich white folk and that, therefore, the Government should do nothing that gets in the way of rich white folk increaing their wealth, status, and privileges.

In short, low taxes, a minimum of regulation, and a big strong police force to keep the riff raff in line and out of their neighborhoods.

(Remember that third item when you think about the cheerleading for domestic spying by the blogging orcs.)

Spin this any way you like, my Republican friends. Rephrase it in as many high-minded words as you can muster, talk about rising tides lifting all boats and free enterprise and self-reliance, what have you. It still comes down to just three things.

Low taxes, a minimum of regulation, and a big strong police force.

And on those three things George Bush has delivered.

The country's engaged in an expensive war with no end in sight?

The treasury's empty?

New Orleans is dying and large chunks of Mississippi are just gone?

What do you do?

Raise taxes?

Ha!

Cut spending on the poor, the sick, and the young struggling to get through college.

The blonde and I have been working our way through the television adaptation of John le Carre's Smiley's People starring Alec Guinness as George Smiley, thank you Netflix.

It's been a very long time since I read the original trilogy of Smiley novels---Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honorable Schoolboy; and Smiley's People---so I can't remember what I thought Smiley was like before Alec Guinness turned him into Alec Guinness. I might have imagined him as a little bit younger, a little less of an old granny, with a bit more of the adventurer left in him. My idea of spies back then was still based on James Bond, Allistair MacLean novels, and whatever I'd read about Wild Bill Donovan and the OSS during World War II. Le Carre wiped all that out of my head, but it took all three books to do it, I think, so I probably started reading them with a more heroic and virile Smiley in my mind's eye. I do remember thinking of his wife Ann's affair as a sexual betrayal, which means that I saw Smiley as being sexually capable and that I didn't understand that his was the initial betrayal. I didn't understand how thoroughly Smiley had been warped by the spy game, that it had caused him to commit Scrooge's sin---he had withdrawn his soul from all contact and sympathy with other people. He had left Ann long before she left his bed.

A few years later, watching Guinness in the TV adaptations of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People for the first time, I suddenly did understand. Guinness forced me to understand.

The question that I'll never be able to answer for myself now is whether or not he did this by illuminating the character of George Smiley or stealing him from le Carre and rewriting his subtext forever. Anyone out there who has read the books but not seen the TV movies?

With his rolled umbrella, orange suede shoes, and too careful walk---practically the totter of an old woman overloaded with packages making her way home along icy sidewalks---Guinness painted the portrait of a man who has grown too self-protective, despite having very little sympathy for himself, a man determined to keep himself alive and well for no other reason than he needs to be alive and well if he's ever going to catch his nemesis, the Russian spy master, Karla.

And those thick-lensed oversized glasses empahsizing his wide, astonished eyes made it plain that Smiley had become all eyes, which is a way of saying that his only way of dealing with life has become through looking at it, that is, by spying on it.

(The glasses were Guinness's own; he had very bad eyes at that time. One of the more
interesting parts of his books of memoirs is his description of the
results of the operation that fixed the problem. I think it's in My Name Escapes Me but he might have written about it in A Positively Final Appearance, as well.)

The other point Guinness made by making Smiley such an old auntie was that Smiley was never heroic.

Guinness had a strange career when you think about it. He was a leading man who almost never, ever played a hero. In fact I can think of only one time. Star Wars. Obi-wan Kenobi was an old man, worn down by a life of hard adventuring followed by disappointment and defeat, but as Guinness played him the hero was still in him, ready to break out and go to work. Guinness, of course, never saw the young Obi-wan except in his imagination, but after watching Ewan McGregor's swashbuckling you can put on the original Star Wars and see that younger adventurer in Guinness's old wizard. In fact, I think that McGregor's portrayal of Obi-wan was an act of quiet, unassuming, and underappreciated genius, in that he was able to figure out exactly what kind of young man Alec Guinness imagined Obi-wan to have been and show not just that young man but the beginnings of that young man evolving into the old man exactly as Alec Guinness had played him.

All this is just to say that although Guinness didn't have much experience playing it handsome, dashing, and heroic, at least in the movies, he could play it handsome, dashing, and heroic, and what's more he could show in an old man the young hero he used to be---and he decidedly did not do that with George Smiley.

His George Smiley has no traces left of the young man he used to be; whether or not that young man was heroic or not doesn't matter to the George Smiley of the present, who is another man entirely.

Not that Guinness leaves out any shadow of youthful goodness in the old man. Apparently the only thing he remembers about his former self is that he used to be more idealistic. He believed in right and wrong and he believed he was on the side of the angels. Now he is reflexively inclined to say that there are no angels in the spy trade, no complete ones, at any rate, and no one who is wholly a devil.

He remembers being idealistic, but he's like a priest who has lost his faith. He goes through the motions in hopes that the old, familiar devotions will revive the old, familiar feelings. He's loyal to the memory of his ideals more than he is idealistic himself.

In Smiley's People, Smiley is even more of a solitaire than he was in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The plot makes him have to be. He is out there on his own. And this is what is making me ambivalent about the mini-series.

Because the focus is so much on Smiley, the focus is on Alec Guinness playing George Smiley to the point that the series seems to be more about Guinness's portrayal of Smiley than about anything else.

I'm not sure I would be enjoying it at all if somebody else---Ralph Richardson or John Mills or Leo McKern---had been cast in the part. (Well, maybe I would if it had been McKern.) I watched Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy again a couple years ago, and while Guinness was terrific and definitely the star, I think the series would have stood on its own with another Smiley.

Now I'm trying to remember if the books were like that. Did Smiley slowly grow too big for his own story so that by the time le Carre wrote Smiley's People he was writing a pure character study instead of a spy story?

The worst Romeo ever to disgrace our boards was given by none other than me, moi-meme. It was to be seen, a bird of ill-omen, in Perth during the summer of 1939. I wore a reddish wig (I can't think why), a droopy mustache (a big mistake), and Larry Olivier's cast-offs from the Gielgud production of four years earlier. Pamela Stanley, who had recently made a success in the West End as Queen Victoria, played Juliet and brought to the part of sorts of pretty little Victorian manners; in fact everything except a German accent.

The first night was memorable. I lept the garden wall for the balcony scene---'He jests at scars that never felt a wound'---whereupon the wall fell flat. With professional sang-froid I ignored the whole thing and struck a romantic pose of extreme yearning.

But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?It is the East and Juliet is the sun.

At which moment the balcony fell off, to reveal, gasping with astonishment, Miss Stanley in her nightie. Another foot forward and she would have tumbled to her eternal rest. The curtain was lowered. After ten minutes of hammering, we started again, to tumultuous applause. The audience was thoroughly enjoying the mishaps, as they always do, but they also wanted, I think, to show their admiration for Miss Stanley not succumbing to the vapours. A few nights later we got successfully as far as 'It is the East and Juliet is the sun' when---No, not so, there was no Juliet. Distant cries for help were heard; she was locked in the lavatory. The curtain was lowered once more while the stage carpenter was sent to release her. It should never have risen again but we persevered. On the last night my ginger mustache got stuck to the phial of poison and after much spluttering with Romeo's last line, "Thus with a kiss I die,' it managed to tansfer itself to Miss Stanley's lips. She was not amused.

President Bush presents a clear and present danger to the rule of law.
He cannot be trusted to conduct the war against global terrorism with a
decent respect for civil liberties and checks against executive abuses.
Congress should swiftly enact a code that would require Mr. Bush to
obtain legislative consent for every counterterrorism measure that
would materially impair individual freedoms.

But if secrecy were pivotal to the NSA’s
surveillance, why is the president continuing the eavesdropping? And
why is he so carefree about risking the liberties of both the living
and those yet to be born by flouting the Constitution’s separation of
powers and conflating constructive criticism with treason?

Wordsworth’s turn away from politics was responsible for the
extraordinary flourishing of his poetry after 1797. What animates his
best work is his struggle to transcend the radicalism of his youth, to
rescue its benevolent impulses while escaping its shallowness and
intolerance. In a sense, Wordsworth’s intellectual trajectory is
similar to that of the American Trotskyists of the nineteen-thirties,
who became the liberal anti-Communists of the nineteen-fifties. Like
them, Wordsworth found his revolutionary hopes betrayed by history—the
Terror of Robespierre and the rise of Bonaparte. His eloquent hatred of
Napoleon, like a later generation’s hatred of Stalin, came from his
realization that he had wagered his highest hopes on a bloody fraud.
Returning to France in 1802, after ten years of terror and war, he saw
only the corpse of a revolution:

When faith was pledged to new-born Liberty:

A homeless sound of joy was in the sky:

From hour to hour the antiquated Earth

Beat like the heart of Man: songs, garlands, mirth,

Banners, and happy faces, far and nigh!

And now, sole register that these things were,

Two solitary greetings have I heard,

"Good morrow, Citizen!" a hollow word,

As if a dead man spake it!

My Republican-Texan-Bush Voting brother-in-law has been dropping hints he's not much happy with his guy in the White House. Lately he's been telling my father that he's looking forward to Hillary being elected so he won't have to play defense all the time anymore.

My brother-in-law is an extremely bright, articulate, and tenacious guy, and no shrinking violet either, as umpires working Texas Ranger home games can tell you. Watch the Rangers play in Arlington sometime next season and keep your ears open---although you really won't have to listen that hard---you'll hear him. That's his voice carrying out across the stadium, "GET YOUR EYES CHECKED, BLUE!"

In short, my brother-in-law is not the kind who backs down easily from an argument. So I have to figure that if he's tired of defending Bush, it's got to be because he's decided there's nothing there to defend.

He's probably not going to switch to being a Democrat, and I don't think he'll wind up voting for Hillary just to give himself the fun of hating her afterwards. But who knows?

Depends on whether he makes the leap from realizing that Bush and his gang of thieves and thugs have betrayed everything that traditional Republicans and conservatives used to hold dear to realizing that most Republicans in Washington haven't held those things dear for well over a generation now.

When too clever for their own good Right Wing intellectual types, pundits, and their echoes, the blog orcs, trying to make the case that the Republican Party is the party of ideas, accuse Democrats of belonging to what is now the conservative party they aren't aware of the truth of which they speak or of the irony.

But I suspect that at the moment many smart, honest, decent-minded, and humbled, conservatives and Republicans are making that leap...or they are turning the fall they are taking after the Bush Leaguers gave them the push into a Olympic-quality dive.

After reading that passage from Kirsch's essay this afternoon, I wondered hopefully if any important Republican politicians or conservative thinkers and writers might be making the leap soon.

Of course, it isn't necessary that they do. What's necessary is that they realize and realize it quickly that when it comes to the Bush Leaguers it's not just a case of there being nothing there to defend, or even nothing there that was ever worth defending---the time has come when common decency requires all honest men and women to rise up appalled and demand that the bloody fraud be overthrown.

And, serendipitously, after I read Kirsch's review and then came online to blog about it---yes, I was reading the analog version. How quaint.---I made a stop at Berube's page first and found that he's just heard from a conservative-libertarian blogger who has risen up appalled.

I almost feel I don’t know these people anymore. It
seems now they feel government cannot have nearly enough power. Secret
courts, secret warrants, secret prisons, suspect torture, massive data
gathering on all aspects of US citizens including medical records,
library records, and financial records are all wonderful things. . . .

I truly and honestly do not understand. People who once proudly
quoted Franklin’s “Those who give up essential liberty for a little
safety deserve neither” now cheerlead the executive branch on in
removing any judicial oversight, congressional oversight, and in fact
ANY oversight (as most of these laws are secret) from the land. Far
from the transparent government the founders imagined, we are now
entering a system where laws are kept secret, prosecutions are kept
secret, and national security is a password to removing any and all
liberty that stands in the way of anything government wishes to do.

Berube is appreciative of Earnest's declaration of righteous outrage, but he goes on to make clear that the Bush Leaguers and their cheerleaders haven't merely wandered off the good conservative path. They were never on it:

People who support a clandestine program of warrantless domestic spying
are not “conservatives” or “libertarians.” Neither are people who
support the creation of a worldwide archipelago of secret torture
sites. Neither are people who support the usurpation of the functions
of government by the executive branch; who espouse the theory that the
executive branch is the final arbiter of the legality of the actions of
the executive branch; and who call for the investigation or prosecution
of a free press that dares to report on the executive branch’s secret
programs of domestic spying and outsourced torture.

Those people, my friends, are called the radical right.

I don't know how many more will have a Wordsworthian change of heart. Enough, though, I hope to see the corpse of the revolution and hear the words victory, Iraq, 9/11, and terra "as if a dead man spake it."

If President Bush wanted to use the NSA to spy on American citizens here on American soil, he could easily have asked for permission and almost certainly would have received it from the court with the power to give it. As Josh Marshall reports, that court is not in the habit of saying no.

And it was the not asking that was Bush's crime---yes, crime. Break the law, you've committed a crime. Bush committed a crime. Ezra Klein explains, his patience fraying a bit with each reiteration, the law, the procedure Bush should have followed, and why what Bush did was wrong, here,here, and here.

So the question is, why didn't Bush obey the law? It wasn't even as though he was acting in the heat of the moment in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and even if it had been the court and the process were designed for speed. All that was needed was a little bit of paperwork that could have been handled by a junior lawyer in the Attorney General's office who probably would have had to do nothing more than fill out a form and walk it over to the right judge's clerk.

Since telling anyone who disagrees with him, criticizes him, or advises him even with the most obsequious deference to do what he doesn't want to do or not do what he does want to do to fuck off has been Bush's first and often single reflex, it's plausible to read back from the speech to the order itself and hear Bush, as he sets loose the spooks, saying "Fuck you" to any aide who suggested that he ask the judges for permission first.

But Digby and Sifu Tweety hear the first fuck you, the primal fuck you as being said not by Bush himself, or even by Dick Cheney, who we know is good at saying it. The first fuck you was uttered with a shifty look out from under hooded brows and with a tremendous shake of shadowed jowls by Tricky Dick himself, only it sounded like this:

"When the President does it, that means it's not illegal."

W's Presidency is Dick Nixon's Revenge.

Nixon lives on in the Bush White House, his head preserved by former minions and henchman and current acolytes, chief among them Dick Cheney, who tells Bush all he needs to know about the law.

[L]ike Nixon, [Bush] believes that the president has only one "accountability
moment" while he is president. His re-election. Beyond that, he has
been given a blank check. And that includes breaking the law since if
the president does it, it's not illegal, the president being the
executive branch which is not subject to any other branch of
govenrment.

The way they see it [they being the Nixon loyalists, Cheney, Rove, "essentially the whole fat lot of them who were alive at the time"], everything in American political history, from
that unjustified prosecution [of Watergate] right up until 9/11, was a species of
mistake. And in the days after the attacks, as a new reality settled
around us, they realized that this was their grand political reset
button. The political winds, to their minds, finally shifted back to
their natural course.

So
this NSA scandal, this return to the domestic spying of the Nixon
years, is part and parcel of their recreation - amplification - of
those halcyon days. They don’t fight for the right to torture because
they have a hard-on for torture. They fight for torture because the
right is, in our Attorney General’s immortal words, “inherent in the
office of the President.” They don’t eschew negotiation, cross-aisle
communication, or compromise because they are shrewd political
operatives angling to hype up the base. To them, any concession to
Congressional prerogatives is showing weakness to an equal, a rival.
This is why they hold open votes, threaten nuclear options. What do
they care for the traditions and precedents of the Congress? They are
The Presidency. They don’t fight “activist judges” because of some kind
of constructionist ideology, or even, for that matter, because they
crave specific rulings. They fight for ready-to-knuckle-under simps
like Scalito because, to them, the three branches of government no more
act in concert than do three squabbling candidates in the heat of
primary season, or three College Republicans fighting for the same
assistant treasurership. They have their horse in this campaign, the
presidency, and to win, in this case, means to win absolutely, to take
the reins of power singly. Sharing the work of governing is abdication,
defeat. You can see this attitude in WPE’s dismissive public comments.
In winning the election his office became our nominee for the next
phase of the campaign. We backed his horse. Now we need to shut up,
stay outside the sausage factory, and let them do what they do best.

Some day, when they are all dead and presenting themselves at the gates
of heaven, the current crop of the Washington Media Elite will stand
before a tribunal of judges including the shades of I.F. Stone, Edward
R. Murrow, and Jack Anderson. The judges will look down from their
thirty foot high bench built out of the leather bound transcripts of
the Nixon tapes, the Iran-Contra hearings, and Ken Starr's final report
on Monica, and they will ask David Broder, speaking for the rest of his
clubmates, "Tell us, please, explain to us, we beg you, how when George
W. Bush first declared for President in 1999, you all looked at the
collection of former Nixon henchmen and bagmen, Iran-Contra traitors
and thugs rallying to his side, a gang brought together by everything that was vile in
American politics going back 30 years, and you turned to the rest of
the country and said, 'Fear not this seeming moron, George W. Bush,
because he is a man of the people, a regular guy, who just wants to
bring honor and dignity back to the White House, and if you doubt our
word, why, behold, look at this troop of distinguished statesmen lined
up to advise him and help him steer our battered ship of state to safe
harbor!'"

And Dean Broder will plead for mercy, saying, "But they gave us access! He bestowed upon us nicknames!"

The judges will put their heads together for three seconds and then speak us one.